# Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Cache

**Company:** [Cloudflare](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/cloudflare)
**Location:** Atlanta, GA, Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, Denver, CO, New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, DC
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $168k – $231k/yr
**Experience:** 4+ years
**Skills:** Rust, Go, C, C++, Http, Tcp, Tls, Quic, Linux, Networking, Concurrency, Distributed Systems, Kubernetes, Kafka, Postgres
**Posted:** 2026-09-09

> Design, build, and operate Cloudflare’s globally distributed cache and reverse-proxy data plane, improving performance, correctness, and resilience across the edge. Requires at least 4 years of production systems experience and proficiency in a systems or backend language.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate the high-performance cache and proxy data plane serving content at Cloudflare’s edge and connecting to customer origins.
- Contribute to Pingora and production services built on it, improving asynchronous I/O, connection handling, memory and disk efficiency, and tail latency.
- Improve cache correctness and performance through object placement, retention, admission and eviction policies, range-request handling, and resilience to corrupt or incomplete data.
- Build globally distributed purge and Tiered Cache systems that invalidate content quickly, select efficient cache paths, improve hit rates, and reduce origin load.
- Deliver shared platform capabilities and customer-facing APIs and rules for cache keys, TTLs, response handling, purge behavior, and programmatic access from Workers.
- Own features end to end, including technical design, implementation, automated testing, observability, staged rollouts, and production operations.
- Participate in on-call rotation, lead incident response and postmortems, and improve reliability, capacity, and operational tooling.
- Use traffic cohorts, measurable guardrails, and rollback mechanisms to introduce high-impact changes safely.
- Partner with product and engineering teams that depend on or extend the cache and proxy platform.
- Contribute through code review, mentorship, written communication, and improvements to team standards and tooling.

## Requirements
- At least 4 years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production software systems.
- Strong proficiency in at least one systems or backend language such as Rust, Go, C, or C++, with willingness to work in Rust.
- Strong understanding of HTTP semantics and transport protocols including TCP, TLS, and QUIC.
- Experience designing and implementing secure, resilient, high-performance distributed systems.
- Experience with Linux systems, networking, concurrency, and performance analysis.
- Production ownership experience, including monitoring, debugging, on-call, incident response, and reliability improvements.
- Experience using metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and experiments to understand production behavior and validate improvements.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including technical design writing and cross-team project leadership.
- Willingness to use AI-assisted engineering tools while maintaining accountability for correctness, security, and design quality.

## Nice to Have
- Professional experience with Rust or high-performance asynchronous systems.
- Experience with caches, HTTP proxies, CDNs, distributed storage, or latency-sensitive data-plane services.
- Experience analyzing memory use, disk I/O, resource contention, and tail latency in production systems.
- Experience building APIs or distributed control planes using event streaming, relational databases, or analytical data systems.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or similar infrastructure.
- Experience contributing to open-source software or leading multi-team engineering programs.

## Compensation
- San Francisco estimated base salary: $194,000–$266,000.
- Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York estimated base salary: $185,000–$254,000.
- Denver, Austin, Illinois, and Atlanta estimated base salary: $168,000–$231,000.
- Eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

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